Israeli politicians’ thin pretext for the latest attack on Gaza doesn’t add up, and the willing media doesn’t seem to care.

Omer Bar-Lev, a Laborite who is Israel’s police minister, recently visited a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank and posted a video showing border police training at a staged set of Damascus Gate. The video is a colorful proof of the apartheid reality of Israel’s rule of Palestinians and shows that there will never be a two-state solution. Even leftleaning Jewish pols bend over backward to appease the settlers.

Israel postponed its eviction of the Salhiya family in Sheikh Jarrah to make way for a Palestinian school after international outrage apparently caught the government by surprise. But it’s a familiar pattern. Israel gets away with whatever ethnic cleansing it can get away with, until the resistance, international critique, or condemnation become loud enough for it to delay and use other methods towards the same end.

After an Israeli official tells an American diplomat that the country will treat settler violence against Palestinians “severely,” Prime Minister Naftali Bennett leaps in to defend the settlers, his political base. “There are marginal elements in every community… but we must not generalize about an entire community.”

Following a pogrom in Southern Hebron that injured a 3-year-old Palestinian child, Israeli human rights organizations started an ad campaign calling on the Defense Minister and Internal Security Minister to end settler violence. Israeli bus companies removed the ad within a day after pressure from rightwing activists.